the field of education for his life work solely from a

desire to be of some material benefit to mankind since

the meager salary which accompanied his professorship

was not of sufficient import to influence him in the

slightest degree.

Always keenly interested in biology, his almost

unlimited means had permitted him to undertake, in

secret, a series of daring experiments which had

carried him so far in advance of the biologists of his

day that he had, while others were still groping

blindly for the secret of life, actually reproduced by

chemical means the great phenomenon.

Fully alive to the gravity and responsibilities of his

marvellous discovery he had kept the results of his

experimentation, and even the experiments themselves, a

profound secret not only from his colleagues, but from

his only daughter, who heretofore had shared his every

hope and aspiration.

It was the very success of his last and most

pretentious effort that had placed him in the

horrifying predicament in which he now found himself--

with the corpse of what was apparently a human being in his

workshop and no available explanation that could possibly

be acceptable to a matter-of-fact and unscientific police.

Had he told them the truth they would have laughed at

him. Had he said: "This is not a human being that you

see, but the remains of a chemically produced

counterfeit created in my own laboratory," they would

have smiled, and either hanged him or put him away with

the other criminally insane.

This phase of the many possibilities which he had

realized might be contingent upon even the partial

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